Middle School Marketing Talks Twitter, Strategy and Twin Tech

If it's an 8am meeting with eager conversations about Twitter and measuring ROI, it must mean the Middle School Marketing crew was back in action yesterday morning at the Lab.

We gathered again this month to continue our conversation about bridging traditional best practices in online marketing with the latest trends in social media marketing. As so many marketing conversations do lately, ours quickly focused in on Twitter (proud new owners of the local startup Summize). When it comes to the bottom line, one person asked if it is worth investing the time and energy into Twitter. (And for that matter, what about the rest of the social media utility world?) While the group had various perspectives on how they used Twitter, without a doubt it's biggest value was in providing a radically improved tool to help companies do a better job of listening. Nicholas was even kind enough to put together a spreadhseet of helpful services.

Also, we continued to wrestle with the issue of how to show ROI on conversations, blog posts and other less quantifiable actions that don't fit the marketing world's traditional benchmarks and metrics. There continue to be an emerging list of services to help in this space (Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Filtrbox and BuzzLogic among others), but we're still in the early stages of learning how to build the right tool with the right type of metrics. No doubt this will continue to be an ongoing conversation.

No matter the social media monitoring tool in place, one problem everyone faces is the ongoing issues raised by dealing with anonymity. It's been a challenge ever since the birth of the interwebs, but it's encouraging to see the emergence of more tools, education and strategies to help people claim their real identity. It improves the conversation for everyone, and hopefully tools like Disqus and Intense Debate, will not only help foster constructive conversations, but also provide community managers and blog authors better information about their community members.

We also took a step back from the social media tools to look at the bigger strategy picture. With all the shiny object syndrome going around these days, it's easy to focus too much on the latest applications, and not enough on answering the big questions. Just as form follows function, the social media tools need to be in line with the bigger strategic business goals. Above all else, I think this question will be a continuing talking point and area of discussion for the Middle School Marketing folks in the coming months.

And finally, we chatted about tonight's upcoming Twin Tech event. A few in our motley crew have feet firmly planted in the old and new school of business tech, and it will be great to see how the DC area's two tech worlds mesh.

As always, anytime you can start the day talking with other passionate and brilliant folks about how digital marketing can improve, you know it's going to be a good day indeed. We're looking forward to next month's conversation.